Mixing Colours and Keeping your Work Space Clean

Not only clean, but organised also. If you cannot control the colour while it is on your pallet, how can you hope to control it on your painting?? If you are not organised you will get frustrated, and rush it. Near enough is not good enough, and never will be. Below is my studio pallet set up on glass. There are some points below that will help you to achieve nice clean colours;

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A simple idea but it works so well.

Never mix colours with a brush. There is no quicker way to lose control of a colour. Note the Pallet Trowel that I use above. This does not have your knuckles receiving as much paint as the brush does.Clean your pallet off regularly, you cannot be too fussy. When you switch to light colours, clean it off again.

If you are painting outside ( Pleine Aire ) then you should be making sure that the wind does not destroy your ability to concentrate. Use ‘Bulldog Clips’ to hold rags and paper to clean your brushes. Rags should be used only to clean the excess turpentine from your brushes, but paint that is cleaned from brushes, or pallet should go into an old copy of the phone book or similar. This is absorbent, and easy to flip the next page over, to create another nice clean surface to clean your next colour on. All held down by another trusty Bulldog clip, as you will see above. You can have the heavy clips hanging down the side of your pallet to save mixing space? The wind will find out your weaknesses, and drive you crazy with them!! You cannot have too many ‘bulldog clips’.

I use this glass pallet on an old Tea Trolley in the studio, but this is far too heavy for on location.